Towards a sustainable material use in the automotive industry: Life Cycle Costing and socio-technical approach to material use

The purpose of the article is twofold. We first present a Life Cycle Costing methodology applied at different scales to compare between design options in terms of materials use: in an automobile vehicle part, a whole vehicle, and a car manufacturer’s portfolio. The Life Cycle Costs consider costs for different stakeholders, including environmental damage costs (supported by the civil society), fuel expenses (supported by the customer) and materials costs (supported by the car manufacturer). The second objective of the article is to bring a management and socio-technical vision to the issue of material use in the automobile industry, in order to challenge the idea that all decisions regarding material use depend on purely technical and economic criteria. Through a qualitative research, we investigated the barriers to material efficiency and integrating the environmental criterion in decision making from a French car manufacturer’s perspective. Within the same company, we also collected material experts’ feedbacks on the LCC tool developed in the first Part, both in terms of methodology and potential integration in decision-making.